"2018.06.16 duet with Michael Pestel — Middletown, CT — via FaceTime": Starting on January 1st, 2018, I began making a movie every day of me playing (M)Usic.  The plan was to shoot one every day of 2018 & to string together excerpts from each of them in chronological order to make a feature-length movie to be called "365".  Along the way I decided to compile monthly reports named by month & year, e.g.: "January, 2018", & to release these online a month after they were done.  Hence, "January, 2018" was uploaded on March 1, 2018.  I started thinking about each month more & more thematically.  "May, 2018" became my piano month.  "June, 2018" is my duets month.  It was difficult to find 30 local people willing to play a duet with me to meet my goal of a different duet for every day in June so I contacted people in my international contacts to somehow make a duet together — using Skype or some other means.  We've been playing the duets for as long as they take, spontaneously deciding when they were over, & then I've been excerpting roughly :20 to a minute to use in "June, 2018" & "365".  At 1st, each movie that I made documenting each duet was thought of as little more than raw footage but, gradually, they started seeming like significant works in & of themselves.  SO, after I'd edited the footage I shot with Michael Pestal via FaceTime, I decided to declare each movie to stand on its own & to break my pattern of waiting a month to post the monthly footage to post one of these daily duets every other day starting today, June 16th, until mid-August when all of them would be uploaded.  This 16th one features one of my olest collaborators in Pittsburgh, along with Ben Opie & Hyla Willis.  Alas, he's long since relocated to Middletown, CT.  The 1st project we worked on together was our "Interspatiality" in honor of the architect Jill Watson.  A movie of that that I made can be found on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/K5nsRUM90Bg .  Since then, we've collaborated many, many times — including on an installation for the Pittsburgh Biennial at the PCA (Pittsburgh Center for the Arts) in 2003 called "Harps & Angles".  The performance version of the documentary I made about that is here: http://youtu.be/Qk_UOY0c1bk .  We don't get many opportunities to play together anymore, partially because of our different localities & partially because Michael's busy child-raising.  As such, this was a particular joy & we were both reminded of how much fun playing together can be.  Michael's an excellent multi-instrumentalist & even this brief movie gives an idea of the creative fecundity of his music room.  On a different note, I often explain to people that I'm not a musician, that I'm a Usician, a Low Classicist, a booed usician, a Sound Thinker, etc.  People often seem to agree that I'm not a musician because they hate the way I play so much & hate the way I break all sorts of unwritten laws about what makes 'good music'.  In other words, they don't understand that I'm trying to make a point that I'm thinking about context & creatively exploring it.  - tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE note written on July 14, 2018E.V. 

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